1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to the field of computers, and specifically to blade servers. Still more particularly, the present disclosure relates to load balancing between blade chassis in a blade center.
2. Description of the Related Art
While early computer architectures utilized stand-alone single computers, often referenced as Personal Computers (PCs), more powerful modern computer systems often use multiple computers that are coupled together in a common chassis. An exemplary common chassis is known as a blade chassis, which includes multiple blades that are coupled by a common backbone within the blade chassis. Each blade, called a server blade when the blade chassis functions as a blade server for an enterprise, is a pluggable board that comprises at least one processor, on-board memory, and an Input/Output (I/O) interface. The multiple blades are capable of communicating with one another, as well as sharing common resources, such as storage devices, monitors, input devices (keyboard, mouse), etc.
Multiple blade chassis make up a blade center. A blade center is often dedicated to a single enterprise and/or a particular function, such as processing loans, managing payroll, etc. Because the blade center is made up of multiple blade chassis, an imbalance in workload between different blade chassis often occurs. Current load balancing typically does little more than moving work from an overloaded chassis to a less busy chassis by monitoring total data traffic to the different chassis. This type of load balancing does little to detect and correct underlying reasons for the load imbalance.